In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Arthur Kroker remarks:

"If molecular biology can adapt so quickly to the epistemological possibilities of the order of the transgenic, it may be because the spectre of transgenics originates less in the order of science than in culture" (p.30).

And has sport not contributed to this epistemological awakening? As a site of cultural (re)production, is sport not implicated in this normalization of the will to technology?

The hybrid, the mutant, the replicant: transgenic variants all seen in the crucible of the high performance athletic arena or dreamt of in the sportocratic laboratory.

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion Plate 99, 1887

Ever since Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion photos and the subsequent dawn of biomechanics, the body athletic has been considered a problem in Newtonian physics: forces, levers, torques, velocities and accelerations, each describing a specific movement. As a result, of course, the athlete comes to be viewed as belonging to an Erector Set of body parts, from which ideal collections and assemblages are regularly imagined, particularly in the context of high performance sport. "If only he had an arm to go with those legs." Or, metaphorically: "I wish I could put this guy's heart in that guy's body."

best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed.

Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka.

It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.

Or by voting in presidential elections.

(Gibson, Idoru)

Replication has also long been manifest in the sportocratic imagination, its genealogical roots reaching back at least to the mechanical reproduction of baseball cards and bubblegum. But these flattened, lifeless representations lack sufficient dynamism for a culture hell-bent on its own immortality, and so we begin to animate the images by repurposing the data stocks and flows generated as a derivative of baseball's industrial production process. At the cusp between biomechanics and the age of simulation, Strat-O-Matic becomes the link in the helical chain connecting Branch Rickey and scientific management in baseball with Billy Beane, the sabermetric revolution and the third wave eugenics of baseball performance.

In that time, a whole industry has emerged around so-called "fantasy sports". But the fantasy these games deliver isn't to be like the pros, as is purported. It is rather a fantasy of cloning, a fantasy of pro athletes, Sea Monkeys and Monopoly recombined into one alluring hybrid, a fantasy of ownership. Play capitalist and own your own sports team, though the vectoralist still retains class power.

The "authentic replica" sports jersey offers another example of the "spectre of transgenics" in a hyperreal sportocratic culture: replication of the star athlete via an equivalence embedded in the code of the extended skin – all in the context of a post-industrial capitalism of signs and symbolic exchanges. In this case, the fantasy is of becoming-clone, the successful and particular cloning of a purebred stock.

Presumably, then, the inauthentic replica of a cheaper jersey carries an equivalence to the bastard laboratory experiments that preceded the birth of Dolly the Sheep?

Finally, we may discuss sports videogames and virtual worlds, which also allow us the potential of becoming-clone. As with fantasy sports, this is once again made possible by repurposing the data stocks and flows generated during games, but the stakes have increased, since no longer do we rely on static photographs but rather advanced body-xeroxing technologies such as motion capture, green screen, and biometric scan.

It seems appropriate, then, to conclude my thoughts with a sample from Baudrillard, who, in his "The Clone or the Degree Xerox of the Species", writes:

Multiplication is positive only in our system of accumulation. In the symbolic order, it is equivalent to subtraction. If five men pull on a rope, the force they exert is added together. By contrast, if an individual dies, his death is a considerable event, whereas if a thousand individuals die, the death of each is a thousand times less important. Each of two twins, because he has a double, is ultimately just half an individual — if you clone him to infinity, his value becomes zero (Screened Out, p.199).

Not long ago I remarked that a practice had most certainly entered the mainstream if Microsoft, one of the world's richest companies, represented it as Office clip art. In that case I was referring to the practice of watching television while exercising on cardio apparatus — the perfect circuitry that is created when body flows to stationary bike and back again, rhythmically complementing a parallel process in which mind flows to telescreen and back again.

When I got my first taste of a commercial fitness club, I was struck by the bank of televisions that faced the cardio equipment area, each tuned to soap operas, sports programs, or 24-hour news channels, depending on the time of day. Data downloads or consumption program patches to make the body production process more profitable, no doubt.

But suppose the telescreen was showing a different program. Suppose that the "show" constituted a closed-circuit surveillance of the child care centre at the fitness club? This feature is currently becoming more commonplace in the sportscapes of contemporary fitness and suggests an interesting consequence of the inertia that develops when one exercises on standard cardio apparatus: one is now able to watch one's baby the entire time during a workout.

To understand the gestation of such a development, we must look back to the submarines of WWI, which required the development of vision without sight to detect enemy boats while underwater. Thus, the introduction of active sonar, which functioned by pulsing sound outwards and then measuring the waves that would reflect back from any object within range.

It was after WW2 that a direct descendent of this technology, in the form of ultrasonic sonography, would be repurposed by the medical establishment as a means of looking within the body — to see, among other things, developing foetuses in utero. Already we see the emergence of a digital umbilical delivering information from the baby to its parents and medical authorities, while its organic equivalent runs in parallel from the placenta to deliver nutrient-rich blood. Sound is used to create an image of the baby, the acoustic rendered optic.

To borrow from Virilio, it is military technology and a particular requirement to organize perception in the murky depths of the ocean battlefield that at a later point in time expedites an endocolonization of the human body.

Of course, once the baby leaves the abyss of the womb, light penetrates the darkness, mutating the digital umbilical from one that facilitates an acoustic vision to a more classical (though remoted) optic vision that takes place when the mother is exercising on cardio equipment while watching her loved one via closed circuit camera. Separation anxiety assumes a different form by shifting to the parents, since in the digital sense, the child is yet to be fully born, remaining instead attached to its digital umbilical.

Re-watched David Cronenberg's eXistenZ last night, an existential meditation on reality and the virtual realities of future videogame worlds. Without spoiling the plot (since this is really a must-watch movie), Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law are the main characters negotiating their way through the chaos that ensues when a focus group for a new videogame is hijacked by an activist intent on killing the game's designer (Jason Leigh).

Another motif that reappears in the movie is one of hygiene, infection, mutation, etc. Of particular interest is the idea that there is some sort of possibility for hygiene/infection that may permeate the invisble membrane between the digital and the organic, a question I have pondered myself.

Finally, we note that Geller (Jason Leigh) is an extremely tactile and sensual woman, demonstrated repeatedly in the ways she touches, caresses or otherwise explores objects and surfaces with her hands. In fact, since the game is jacked directly into her nervous system, she plays with her eyes closed and her hands manipulating the interface as necessary. I see strong resemblances between her and this young man.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

Guy Debord

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

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for June, 2006.
sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.